Wednesday, November 21, 2012.
Cheesecake. Root Beer Into Glaze. Sticky New Floor.
The Marys became hungry at about the same moment when I finished today's NOMenu Daily. They announced that we would be going to The Chimes, because it was just too nice a day not to dine outdoors. That idea was widely held in Covington, and we arrived to a twenty-minute wait for outdoor tables.
I let the girls wait, and I ran an errand. Somehow, all six or seven of the brooms our household owns are missing, including a little one I hide in a corner of my office behind my golf clubs. (Gee, it's been a long time since I played golf. Not since Katrina took my son Jude away.
When I returned, the Marys were digging into a bowl of ordinary spinach-artichoke dip with fried bowtie pasta. Neither part of that assault on the palate is to my liking, but I ate a few anyway. When you put something that in any way resembles a chip within reach, you can't resist eating it.
I thought I'd succumb to another dietary evil by ordering my monthly allowed hamburger. The Chimes does a good job with burgers. Mary Leigh, my burger authority, likes them well enough that she had one, too. (One, two! One, two!) Mary Ann had a salad with shrimp. Another Anywhere, USA meal for your gourmet. I believe it's payback for the good luck I live in having such a wife and such children.
The radio show was predictably busy with the expected topics: the root-beer-glazed ham, how to brine the turkey, and other Thanksgiving matters. At its end, I got to work on those selfsame projects.
Always first on the list is the cheesecake. An hour of mixing the filling and making the crust. An hour and twenty minutes of baking. An hour of cooling inside the oven. An hour of cooling outside the oven. Only then can it enter the refrigerator, and I can slip into my bed. That happened just before midnight.
The sugar and cream cheese blend in the mixer bowl for fifteen minutes. That's what makes the final result light. It also gives me time to get the ham glaze ingredients into a saucepan and start simmering it down. Unexpected problem: no pepper jelly in the house. How is that possible? I had to improvise with goumi jelly a friend gave me, with crushed red pepper flakes and hot sauce mixed in.
Goumi? What's that? I looked it up just now. It's the smallish fruit of a bush that grows in temperate areas. The guy who gave it to me bought it in rural Mississippi somewhere. For that reason alone, I will not add it to my recipe, although it worked just fine.
With the cheesecake and the glaze both in motion, I undertook the cleaning of the guest bathroom, which needed a few tiles replaced. I had the tiles and the glue and the toothed trowel. I cleaned the room out thoroughly, ripped out the old tiles, and spread the gooey adhesive which would shortly begin getting tracked throughout the kitchen. This project should not have been undertaken the night before Thanksgiving. So I am guilty of the same lack of foresight I have been accusing MA of.
